The role of historical and ecological factors on initial survival of Copaifera langsdorffii Desf. (Fabaceae)

Abstract

The plant population dynamic is affected by ecological and evolutionary processes that operate at all stages of the plant life cycle. The aim of this study was to characterize the seed and seedling performance of Copaifera langsdorffii by testing four hypotheses: the resource concentration hypothesis; the relationship between seed size and germinability hypothesis; the relationship between seed size and seedling vigor hypothesis; and the intraspecific seedling competition hypothesis. All seeds used in the experiments were collected from 35 C. langsdorffii plants located in a fragment of the Brazilian cerrado (savanna). The number of fruits per plant negatively affected Rhinochenus brevicollis attacks on C. langsdorffii seeds. Therefore, this result does not support the resource concentration hypothesis, and predator satiation was used in order to explain the observed result. In general, seed germinability (percentage and time to emergence) was not influenced by seed size. The homogeneity of the experimental design, together with an abundant water supply, may have masked the effects of seed size on germinability. Seed size positively affected seedling development, corroborating the expected relationship between seed size and seedling vigor. The number of se edling per plastic bags negatively affected the growth of C. langsdorffii. The nutrient-limited soil probably promoted the below-ground competition for nutrients among seedlings. Finally, the role of evolutionary and ecological factors on C. langsdorffii population dynamics is discussed.

Seed predation of Copaifera langsdorffii (Fabaceae): a tropical tree with supra‐annual fruiting

“…Immature insects consume all of the endosperm plus the embryo of the seed during their development, while the seed coat is preserved until adult emergence. Only one R. brevicollis per seed is found in C. langsdorffii (Fagundes et al ). R. brevicollis can use the fruits of Copaifera oblongifolia as an alternative host, but this plant was not found in the study area.…”

“…Pre-and post-dispersal seed predation vary among plant species and among populations, and can frequently cause a significant reduction in the number of viable seeds (Mattson 1980;Crawley & Gillman 1989;Francisco et al 2008), thereby affecting plant population dynamics and community organization (Janzen 1971;Fagundes et al 2013b). Several insects (especially Bruchidae and Curculionidae) are highly specialized seed predators (Janzen 1981) that are affected by plant characteristics at both the population and the individual level (Fenner et al 2002;Rossi et al 2011;Fagundes et al 2013a;Zywiec et al 2013).…”

Soil fertility and rainfall during specific phenological phases affect seed trait variation in a widely distributed Neotropical tree, Copaifera langsdorffii

“…Flowering occurs in the rainy season, with seed dispersion during the dry season (Pedroni et al, 2002;Costa et al, 2016). The fruits have a single ellipsoid black seed that is partially wrapped in a yellow-orange aril (Carvalho, 2003;Fagundes et al, 2013). Birds are the main dispersers (Rabello et al, 2010), but seeds that fall on the ground can also have their arils removed by ants (Leal and Oliveira, 1998;Fagundes et al, 2013).…”

Resource allocation in Copaifera langsdorffii (Fabaceae): how a supra-annual fruiting affects plant traits and herbivory?

“…The annual average temperature is 23 ºC with rainfall of approximately 1 000 mm/year, with rains concentrated between November and January (Fagundes et al, 2013a). The soil of the study area is dystrophic with a developed herbaceous subshrub layer, generally affected by fire (Fagundes, et al 2013b). During the month of May in each studied year (time of vegetative growth and before leaf fall), ten terminal branches were sampled from all marked plants.…”